OpenAL on OSX: get the best 3D audio
out of your Mac.
25/12/06 22:18 |Audio
Popular amongst game programmers, OpenAL provides
interactive positional 3D audio on the Mac, as well as Linux,
Windows (to name a few OSs) and is natively supported in OSX since
Tiger. Not all Mac games use OpenAL as their audio library, but a
good number of flagship titles such as Call Of Duty 2 or Unreal
Tournament rely on OpenAL for their game audio.
The OpenAL renderer is the piece of OS software that gets directives from the game engine such as "play this sound at this 3D coordinate", or "the listener is now at that 3D coordinate", and computes the sound stream that you will listen to on your speakers. In order to do the best job possible, the OpenAL renderer needs to know what your speaker setup is. Do you have just two speakers? Or do you have a 5.1 speaker system? 6.1? 7.1? You want the renderer to take full advantage of all your speakers so you can enjoy the most accurate spatial recreation of the game soundscape. Depending on the audio output device you use, you need to tell OSX how many speakers you use, whether it's your laptop speakers, a Creative Xmod, or a Griffin FireWave.
Unfortunately, you cannot use System Preferences to take care of that. Instead you need to launch Audio MIDI Setup located in Applications > Utiities. For instance to properly configure an Xmod, in the drop-down list "Properties for", select "Creative Xmod". Click "Configure Speakers". Select "Multichannel" then "5.1 Surround.
Note that clicking on each speaker label will play white noise in that speaker. Use it to test you are getting "surround sound".
Now go and test that Call Of Duty 2 (or any OpenAL title for that matter) and enjoy the difference this makes.
Disclaimer: my current employer is Creative Labs, which is an active supporter of OpenAL, and I have been involved in the release of OpenAL on Windows. Oh, and I'm an active supporter of OpenAL too!
The OpenAL renderer is the piece of OS software that gets directives from the game engine such as "play this sound at this 3D coordinate", or "the listener is now at that 3D coordinate", and computes the sound stream that you will listen to on your speakers. In order to do the best job possible, the OpenAL renderer needs to know what your speaker setup is. Do you have just two speakers? Or do you have a 5.1 speaker system? 6.1? 7.1? You want the renderer to take full advantage of all your speakers so you can enjoy the most accurate spatial recreation of the game soundscape. Depending on the audio output device you use, you need to tell OSX how many speakers you use, whether it's your laptop speakers, a Creative Xmod, or a Griffin FireWave.
Unfortunately, you cannot use System Preferences to take care of that. Instead you need to launch Audio MIDI Setup located in Applications > Utiities. For instance to properly configure an Xmod, in the drop-down list "Properties for", select "Creative Xmod". Click "Configure Speakers". Select "Multichannel" then "5.1 Surround.
Note that clicking on each speaker label will play white noise in that speaker. Use it to test you are getting "surround sound".
Now go and test that Call Of Duty 2 (or any OpenAL title for that matter) and enjoy the difference this makes.
Disclaimer: my current employer is Creative Labs, which is an active supporter of OpenAL, and I have been involved in the release of OpenAL on Windows. Oh, and I'm an active supporter of OpenAL too!
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